Anti-Gay Jim Crow Comes to Kansas

What does this mean in the real world? If you and your partner want to go buy groceries, but the owner—or manager—doesn’t “agree” with your relationship, they can refuse you service. If you want to go the movies, and the owner decides she’s uncomfortable—she can kick you out. Hotels can deny entry, gyms can deny access, and restaurants can eject you without consequence.

Obviously, some gay couples will want to sue. But under the law, anyone who turns away a gay couple is immune to a civil suit. What’s more, the couple will have to pay their opponents attorney’s fees.

On top of all of this, the bill authorizes anti-gay discrimination by anyone who works for the state of Kansas. Ambulances can refuse to come to the home of a gay couple, park managers can deny them entry, state hospitals can turn them away, and public welfare agencies can decline to work with them. Yes, the bill requires private managers and state employees to refer the couple to another person who will conduct their business, but in reality, those rules have a habit of falling by the wayside.

And while the bill is presented as a measure directed explicitly at same-sex couples, the language is much more ambiguous. One clause allows discrimination as long as the transaction is “related to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement.”

There’s no way to know if a given transaction is related to a gay partnership. In most cases, there’s no way to know if someone is gay. But that doesn’t matter. Under this bill, if you believe someone is gay and purchasing something or making arrangements for the sake of a civil union or same-sex marriage, you can deny them service. Indeed, they don’t even have to be gay. Anyone suspected of working towards those ends could be subject to legalized harassment.

To put this simply, the Kansas House has just endorsed a comprehensive system of anti-gay discrimination. If it becomes law—which isn’t unlikely, given Republican control of the statehouse and governorship—it will yield a segregated world for gays and their allies, as they are forced to use businesses and other services that aren’t hostile to them.

I’m not going to page this, because I don’t have the energy to add to the article. I’m feeling really beat down right now. Really wish I could just gush about video games, but watching what’s going down not just in the US but around the world has just left me with no energy. I have no idea what to do.